Download My Free E-Book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts”!

I’ve got a lot to say about storage, as you might have noticed from reading my blog. So I finally sat down and wrote a book on enterprise storage. Now you can download the e-book for free, thanks to support from my friends at SolarWinds!

The book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts“, is intended as an introduction to the field of enterprise storage for technical audiences. It’s not some grand discourse on how storage ought to be done. Rather, it’s an overview of what you need to know about enterprise storage.

I start with some storage basics: The difference between memory and storage, a discussion of storage media, and the perennial topic of block vs. file storage. Then I talk about scaling storage arrays and the capabilities that enterprise arrays bring to the table. In a dozen pages, you’ll know enough to have meaningful conversations with storage vendors.

Then I shift gears, talking about performance and capacity. I begin with throughput vs. latency and the implications of parallel and serial storage access. Then I go into queueing, caching, and streaming and the difference between asynchronous and synchronous access. This will help you to understand how storage works in production.

The next section focuses on understanding storage usage. Storage administrators spend much of their time measuring and analyzing capacity, and this question of utilization is essential. We then talk about optimization of capacity and the trade-off between capacity and performance. If you’re looking at storage management software, this section is for you.

Finally, I wrap up with a discussion of storage best practices: Managing and monitoring storage, storage system sizing and planning, storage design considerations, and data protection fundamentals. This is a very-brief summary of the rules of thumb I’ve come to rely on after decades in enterprise storage.

The whole book is under 30 pages long, and I am very proud to have produced this concise treatment of enterprise storage. I urge you to download the book and give it a read! And I welcome your feedback!

Note: Somehow, the sidebar entitled “Flash Storage” has the wrong text. Here’s the correct sidebar text: “We’ll be talking a lot about flash memory later. Although this is dynamic, solid-state, and read/write, it has special characteristics that make it ill-suited as primary system memory. Plus, it’s non-volatile. Therefore, even though it’s technically memory, we typically use it as storage!”

This e-book is sponsored by SolarWinds, who also handled the formatting, illustrations, and design. I encourage you to learn more about SolarWinds products and check out their thwack technical community, and especially the Geek Speak blog!